Plex is a good option for both recording TV shows and watching your archived shows. I initially used VideoReDo Plus for video editing but then moved to VideoReDo TVSuite version 3 and have upgraded over the years to the current version 6. I have been editing movies with VideoReDo and storing them on hard drives on my server since 2009 when large hard drives became available and I was using DVD's proir to that. mkv file on your hard drive in addition to other video formats or burning to DVD. Yes, VideoReDo TV Suite 6 can save videos as an h.264 encoded. Video compression from MPEG-2 to h.264 is very CPU intensive and VidCoder can run all cores at 100% so you need to use a desktop system with a good heatpipe CPU cooler and plenty of large case fans for ventilation. I use an 8-core 16-thread CPU for my video editing and I tend to edit my MPEG-2 TV recordings with VideoReDo first and save them as MPEG-2 files to later compress to h.264 in batches of 15-30 videos using VidCoder or Handbrake overnight while I'm sleeping. mkv files and the time this takes depends on your computer's CPU and the length and resolution of the video. VideoReDo can also compress MPEG-2 videos to h.264. VideoReDo has an Ad-detective feature to scan videos for commercials but PlayOn's AdSkip feature marks commercials in the video using a timed text track and VideoReDo can see these which makes editing and saving these videos a job of only a few seconds or maybe a minute or two. If your captures are already encoded with h.264 VideoReDo can edit commercials out of these without re-compressing them so it only takes a few minutes to do the edits and save the video. Broadcast TV is encoded with the old MPEG-2 codec so if you're using an older TV tuner or capture device that saves videos using MPEG-2 you should compress those using the newer h.264 codec to save room on your media server's hard drives. VideoReDo is specifically for editing commercials out of broadcast TV recordings or captures by a DVR/HTPC and will work with videos encoded with MPEG-2 or h.264 codecs. The easiest software by far for editing commercials out of these captures or TV recordings is VideoReDo TVSuite 6.

The HD-PVR and Colossus 2 card have a hardware encoder that encodes the video with the h.264 codec so there's no reason to re-compress those if that's what you're referring to as 'rendering'. I have used the Hauppuage HD PVR and Colossus 2 card to capture TV shows and movies from cable TV and satellite TV boxes or streaming devices.

Videoredo tvsuite for mac